Many years ago I gave evidence at the Old Bailey. It was a fraud trial, and I was an expert witness for the prosecution. During the case I got to know DI Frank Cooper of Holborn nick. He told me about his “copper’s nose”, and what bank robbers and the like are really like. He said I shouldn’t think of them as lovable rogues like in the old movies. He said “They’re career criminals, they’re contemptuous of people like you”. Or words to that effect. Along with this: “They think of people like you as mugs. As sheep to be fleeced. They live in a world where only fools and horses work. Fucking parasites”. I shall never forget Frank. He made quite an impression on me.
Farewell to reality
As did Jim Baggott with his 2013 book Farewell to Reality. The subtitle is how fairytale physics betrays the search for scientific truth. I can empathise with that. Scientific progress is what gave us electricity and vaccines and much much more. It’s made the world a better place. Unfortunately scientific progress in fundamental physics has been in short supply in recent decades. So I’m totally on board when Baggott talks about a “Grand Delusion”, and refers to bankers and the financial crash, pointing out that clever people are particularly prone to fooling themselves:
Cover image from Amazon.co.uk
He asks a rhetorical question: what’s the harm if theorists indulge in a little self-delusion? His answer is that damage is being done to the integrity of the scientific enterprise. He says “the damage isn’t always clearly visible and is certainly not always obvious. Fairy-tale physics is like a slowly creeping yet inexorable dry rot. If we don’t look for it, we won’t notice that the foundations are being undermined until the whole structure comes down on our heads”. Well said that man. Especially since in chapter 6 Baggott says the “authorized version” of reality is riddled with problems and contradictions. He says the Standard Model falls way short because it requires a collection of 61 “elementary” particles, and is held together by a set of parameters that must be entered “a posteriori”. He says the chickens all come home to roost when we consider the mass of the electroweak Higgs boson. Good stuff Jim.
Something of an eye-opener
Baggot then moves on to supersymmetry, M-theory, the multiverse, the black hole information paradox, the holographic principle, and the anthropological principle. It’s more good stuff, and something of an eye-opener. You realise that some people are less than honest. Like the people who try to portray M-theory and the multiverse as bona-fide science when it isn’t. With more experience you realise that there are some people who will try to shut down any criticism of their fairy-tale physics. But then a guy like Jim Baggott comes along, and they can’t keep a lid on it. Then when the fairytale physics genie is out of the bottle, you come to see that it has infected his “authorized version” too.
A copper’s nose for fairytale physics
When you play detective you develop a copper’s nose for fairytale physics. You learn to sniff it out. You can smell that something is rotten in the state of QED. Quantum electrodynamics was championed by Richard Feynman, who once gave a lecture on cargo-cult science. Oh the irony. Take a look at the Wikipedia two-photon physics article. It concerns gamma-gamma pair production, and it’s faithful to Baggot’s “authorized version”. It says this: “a photon can, within the bounds of the uncertainty principle, fluctuate into a charged fermion-antifermion pair, to either of which the other photon can couple”. Narrow your eyes. Take a sniff. That’s saying a 511keV photon spends its time morphing into a 511keV electron and a 511keV positron. Which then magically morph back into a 511keV photon. Which nevertheless manages to keep on going at the speed of light. It’s also saying pair production occurs because pair production occurs, spontaneously, like worms from mud. It just isn’t true. The “authorized version” offers a cargo-cult explanation. It’s lies to children. It’s a fairy tale.
The electron is not a point particle
Things unravel fast after that, because QED is a foundational component of the Standard Model. In the Standard Model, the electron is a “fundamental” particle. But how can it be fundamental if you can create it in pair production, and destroy it in annihilation? How does pair production actually work anyway? Through creation operators? Oh come on. And what is an electron? Ask a particle physicist, and what you get is “the electron is an excitation of the electron field”. A non-answer. A fairy tale. Because the Standard Model still peddles Yakov Frenkel’s 1925 specious claim that electrons “have no extension in space at all”. Like Silvan Schweber said on page 86 of QED and the men who made it, quantum field theories were then plagued with divergences. Because people like Wolfgang “not even wrong” Pauli wanted to spite Schrödinger and the other realists. The people who wanted to start with the structure of the electron. The electron is not a point particle, but QED claimed it was, which was both a fairy tale and a fatal flaw. But then the fairy tale was “renormalized”, and QED was raised from the dead by a mathematical trick that simply swept the infinities under the rug. So even to this day the Standard Model doesn’t tie in with classical electromagnetism. That’s where the field concerned is the electromagnetic field. The standard model has twenty-five fields instead, flying in the face of Maxwell’s unification. Electromagnetic geometry just doesn’t feature. It’s totally sidelined, despite curl and stress and frame-dragging and gravitomagnetism. Have you seen Peter Woit’s blog this week? Topological Quantum Field Theory is sidelined too, along with knot theory, which goes back to Thomson and Tait. They’re the guys who introduced the term spherical harmonics, which is used in atomic orbitals. In atomic orbitals “electrons do not orbit the nucleus in the sense of a planet orbiting the sun, but instead exist as standing waves”. That’s why you can diffract an electron. Because it’s the wave nature of matter. But ask a Standard-Model physicist, and he’ll tell you the electron is a point particle. It’s an obvious fairy tale, from people who are contemptuous of people like you.
The minimal standard model Higgs is like a fairy tale
When you ask the Standard-Model physicist about mass you’ll get another fairy tale. Einstein made it clear that “the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content”. That was in 1905 in his famous E=mc² paper. It’s all very straightforward when you understand the wave nature of matter and know about electron spin and the photon in the mirror box. When you catch the massless photon in the mirror-box, it increases the mass of the system. The box is harder to move because the photon is in there, because you have to push against the photon’s energy-momentum too. The photon is moving at the speed of light going around and around inside the box. But because its average location doesn’t change, it’s effectively at rest with respect to you. Then its energy-momentum feels like rest mass. Then when you open the box, what you’ve got is a radiating body that loses mass. The photon is out of the box in a flash. It departs at c from a standing start. But it wasn’t really a standing start. Because whilst the photon looked like a standing wave, it was always going around and around at c, all the time. That’s why the electron goes round in circles in a uniform magnetic field, because spin is real and it’s subject to Larmor precession. Then when you know that spin is real you know that the electron is just a 511keV photon in “a box of its own making”. Photon energy-momentum is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave moving linearly at c. Electron mass is resistance to change-in-motion for a wave going around and around at c. It’s as simple as that. But the Standard Model says mass is all down to the Higgs mechanism. See Matthew Chalmer’s Particle Headache in the 12 November 2012 issue of New Scientist. That’s where you can read Guido Altarelli saying this: “The minimal standard model Higgs is like a fairy tale”.
Bankrupting physics
It’s the same message in the 2013 book Bankrupting Physics by Alexander Unzicker translated by Sheilla Jones. Unzicker says cosmology is relatively OK, but he rips into stuff like the holographic principle, which you probably expect. He then rips into other physics, like the Standard Model, which you probably don’t. In a nutshell, Unzicker says theoretical physics has succumbed to fantasy, and has “gotten lost in bizarre constructs that are completely disconnected from reality”.
Cover image from Amazon.co.uk
On page 240 he says “right now the situation is worse than if we didn’t pay theoreticians at all”. I know what he means. Lee Smolin had string theory in his sights in his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics, as did Woit with Not Even Wrong in 2007. But you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that the problem isn’t just limited to string theory, it’s right there in the Standard Model too. Because peer-review protectionism, big-science groupthink, and propaganda-driven “consensus” have stifled scientific progress. As a result, physics is in mortal danger. Funding pressures are growing. Because progress is stalled. Because something is rotten in the state of physics. What’s particularly telling is that Unzicker’s earlier German version of the book was published by Springer, the scientific publisher. Bear that in mind if you hear people calling Unzicker a crank and telling you not to listen. Then turn your bullshіt detectors to max when you hear those self-same people purring on about the fabulous Higgs boson. Be wary of science writers too. Investigative journalists are like dogs, people try to muzzle them. But science writers are like children’s ponies, they get nuzzled, not muzzled. They get fed and watered with dinners and jollies, they get sugar-lump press releases, and they don’t bite the hand that feeds them. They’ll never admit that they’ve done their bit to spin you a line.
A Zeptospace Odyssey
They won’t tell you that “the Higgs mechanism accounts for about 1 per cent of the mass of ordinary matter, and for only 0.2 per cent of the mass of the universe. This is not nearly enough to justify the claim of explaining the origin of mass”. That was in Gian Francesco Giudice’s 2010 book A Zeptospace Odyssey. Giudice is now head of theory at CERN. On page 173 he says this: “The most inappropriate name ever given to the Higgs boson is ‘The God particle’. The name gives the impression that the Higgs boson is the central particle of the Standard Model, governing its structure. But this is very far from the truth”. That’s the head of theory at CERN saying the Higgs boson isn’t central to the Standard Model. He also says this: “The Higgs sector is rather arbitrary, and its form is not dictated by any deep fundamental principle. For this reason its structure looks frightfully ad hoc”. Giudice tells us the mass of a body is the intrinsic energy of a body at rest, and tells us about E=mc². No problem there. The problem comes when Giudice says the Higgs mechanism gives quarks their mass, and you remember that you’ve never ever seen a quark.
Cover image from Amazon.co.uk
There’s also a problem with that cosmic treacle we’ve all read about in the popscience press. Space isn’t like molasses, not one bit. Electrons don’t slow down and stop. Give an electron in space a kick via Compton scattering, and it doesn’t slow down at all. Cosmic treacle is a fairy-tale. So is the celebrity at the cocktail party. And for the cherry on top, the Higgs mechanism is supposed to be responsible for the mass of “fundamental” particles like the electron, but not the Higgs boson. See Matt Strassler’s blog article The Higgs FAQ 2.0. There are of course no pictures of the Higgs boson. There are no particle tracks because its lifetime is so conveniently short. Instead its existence is “inferred” from a bump on a graph. But that’s OK, it’s a five-sigma bump on a graph. The fact that this could be anything hasn’t made it into the media. However the hype has made it into the media. Because there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. Five-sigma statistics, because when a church needs a miracle, a church gets a miracle. Especially when it’s spent ten billion dollars of your money.
The Higgs Fake
For the low down on that, take a look at Alexander Unzicker’s 2013 book The Higgs Fake. He says physicists such as Einstein would have considered the “discovery” of the Higgs boson to be utterly ridiculous. Unzicker says a whole lot more. He really rips into particle physics, and when you know some physics you know he isn’t talking out of his hat. You know Unzicker is right when he says particle physicists haven’t reduced the number of parameters or incorporated gravity or explained the fine structure constant. Or the mass of the electron and the proton and the neutron. Or why the electron and the proton and their antiparticles are the only stable massive particles we’ve ever seen.
Cover image from Amazon.co.uk
You know particle physicists haven’t explained spin, or charge, or beta decay, or any of the other issues that were important to people like Einstein and Schrödinger. You know instead that particle physicists have made things more complicated rather than more elegant, going against the grain of scientific progress. You know that instead of explaining things, particle physicists have invented things. Things like isospin and color charge and strangeness. Things that aren’t explained at all, and things that are swept under the carpet. Like quark confinement. So you smile wryly when Unzicker quotes from The End of Physics by David Lindley, a former editor at Nature: “In the end, the quark model succeeded by the ironical trick of proving that no quark would ever be directly seen by a physicist. This liberated physicists from any need to demonstrate the existence of quarks in the traditional way”. You smile some more when Unzicker quotes from Constructing Quarks by Andrew Pickering: “a critic could assert that the sea quark and gluon components were simply ad hoc devices, designed to reconcile the expected properties of quarks with experimental findings”. But you don’t smile when Unzicker reminds you that the Higgs boson has a lifetime of circa 10-25 seconds. Because like Unzicker says, such “particles” don’t even leave the collision point. They have never made it to any detector. Their bump-on-a-graph existence is “inferred” from triggering and selection and damn damn statistics.
Bump on a graph images from Eni school, source: http://cms.web.cern.ch and atlas.web.cern.ch
And from missing momentum. Which means decay products that weren’t actually seen, are used to proclaim the existence of particles that weren’t actually seen. Whatever existence there was, was fleeting, transient, ephemeral. Like Unzicker said in The Discovery of What? it really isn’t clear what if anything was discovered. But what his book makes crystal clear, is the driven desire for “the discovery of the century”. Because particle physicists always want to persuade the public and politicians that they deliver value. When actually, they don’t.
Particle physics has form
It all makes grim reading. All the more so because what Unzicker is also saying, is that particle physics has form. He tells us about the neutral current that dates back to 1973, and how data analysers cherry-picked 100 out of 290,000 photographs. He refers to How Experiments End by Peter Galison about the contradictory paper that was never submitted. Unzicker also tells us about the “discovery” of the W boson which dates back to 1983. It too allegedly has a lifetime of 10-25 seconds. So what was actually detected? An electron. And check this out: “Rubbia urged his collaborators to work day and night before his visit to various institutions in the USA. He took a picture of a ‘W-event’ with him. There, Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow all happily agreed that it was the long sought-after W boson (which confirmed their theory, by the way)”. Unzicker says the official announcement was given in a common seminar of groups UA1 and UA2, which reminds you of 4th July 2012. He says CERN management provided Rubbia with the UA2 results privately, and that believing in independent analysis is like believing in Santa Claus. He talks about the top quark which dates back to 1995. He tells us that it too allegedly has a lifetime of 10-25 seconds, and had to exist because: “the bottom quark needed a partner, as the Ws and Zs had to exist because otherwise the standard model was wrong”. We’ve never seen a free quark, remember? This top quark was “seen to decay” into a bottom quark and a W boson. But we’ve never actually seen a top quark, or a bottom quark, or a W boson. The top quark was inferred from particles that were inferred. And after that ”something had to be found in the theoretical boxroom to inspire the next round of high energy experiments”. Groan. A 2cm bubble chamber track was “a great triumph in the study of quark processes” in 1964. A bump on a graph “proved” that quarks were real in 1974. Three jets “proved” that gluons were real in 1979. And yet we have no electron model within the Standard Model. Instead we have physicists making a virtue out of symmetry, and when that doesn’t work, they make a virtue out of symmetry breaking. We have epicycles. Because of groupthink and big science and “singing in the choir”. Because of peer review and the ”suppression of opinions that would endanger the sacred cows of an established field”. Oh it makes grim reading all right. All the more so when you know that particle physicists have painted themselves into a corner and can’t get out.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
They can’t admit that any of it is wrong. They can’t let anybody say it’s wrong either. We all know the Hans Christian Anderson story about The Emperor’s New Clothes. But what we don’t all know, is that his initial version didn’t feature the child. The Emperor got away with it. In the old days fat bishops in palaces got away with it too. They lived a life of ease spouting Latin that ordinary people didn’t understand, taking their tithe for the ultimate jam-tomorrow promise. If challenged they’d spout platitudes like the grace of God surpasseth all human understanding. If confronted they’d say you are not qualified to speak on theological matters. Now times have changed, but not much. Now we have different people pontificating on the origin of the universe. Instead of God did it, nowadays it’s a quantum fluctuation did it, but it’s still turtles all the way down. Susan Greenfield caused an upset when she likened the authors of The Grand Design to the Taliban. She wasn’t far off the mark. Because instead of bishops we have physicists living a life of ease. They don’t spout Latin that you don’t understand, they spout maths that you don’t understand. If challenged they spout platitudes like quantum physics surpasseth all human standing. If confronted they say you are not qualified to speak on theoretical matters.
Propaganda and censorship
The same applies to the bona-fide physicists who can’t get their rock-solid papers into a journal because the editor is some famous physicist with too much to lose. Like I was saying a few weeks back, it’s like they’re up against a magisterium engaged in propaganda and censorship, peddling myth and mystery and standing four-square in the way of scientific progress. That’s why particle physics hasn’t delivered anything useful in the past fifty years. Those “big science” guys don’t tell you they’re researching the secrets of matter and energy so that one day you don’t have to put petrol in your car. Instead they’re hostile to things like cold fusion, and they’ve never been interested in thorium reactors, even though CERN stands for Council European for Research Nuclear. All they’ve given you is ephemera. What happened? The same thing as what happened to Christianity. It started out with love thy neighbour, but before you know it you’ve got a whole raft of useless fat bishops peddling jam tomorrow and lies to children whilst you fill their collection plate. The fat bishops of physics have had jam from you for fifty years, adding up to billions of bucks. But for you it’s always jam tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes. Because of all the propaganda and censorship in physics, aided and abetted by the secret police.
The secret police
When you think of the secret police, you think of some skull-faced guy wearing a black peaked cap. He’s also wearing jackboots and a black leather coat. When he marches into the room flanked by his henchmen, everybody freezes. Got the picture? Wrong picture. The whole point of secret police is that they’re secret. Joe Public doesn’t even know they’re there. But when you’ve been involved with physics for a while, you do. They come in all shapes and sizes, but they’re usually called “moderators”. Woe betide the guy who points out a problem with the Standard Model. His posts get deleted, and he gets banned. Then unless Joe Public catches them in the act, Joe is none the wiser. Nor does he know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. He doesn’t know about those bona-fide physicists who can’t get their rock-solid papers into a journal. Or even get their papers onto the arXiv. The arXiv is an online repository of scientific papers that other scientists and the public can read. The idea is that it’s a shining example of free speech in science. Got the picture? Wrong picture. The arXiv moderators aren’t moderators, they’re secret police. They are the thought police. They are the gatekeepers for the physics Mafia who live a life of ease, funded by you. Got the picture? Right picture.
The standard model is a patchwork-quilt Frankenstein’s monster of a theory
When you get the picture, you come to understand that the Standard Model is a patchwork-quilt Frankenstein’s monster of a theory, and that the Unzicker was spot on. It’s time to stop funding the people who are standing four-square in the way of scientific progress. Because Big-Science fundamental physics is full of quacks and charlatans who have been engaged in scientific fraud for decades. I am reminded of what DI Frank Cooper said. “They’re career criminals, they are contemptuous of people like you. They think of people like you as mugs. As sheep to be fleeced. They live in a world where only fools and horses work. Fucking parasites”. Cheers Frank.
John: I really liked the comparisons of religious orders and their historical hypocrisy with the current state of physics( and many other arenas of society). You and others have demonstrably proved to me beyond any doubt that the Standard Model is: “like totally bogus Dude ! “. Hopefully in the next year or two the whole pandemic situation will subside enough for you to educate we unwashed masses (and a few cleanly scrubbed physicists) via YouTube. I really look forward to that day of reckoning.
LOL! You have such a way with words Greg! As for the reckoning, I think it’s coming, but I’m not sure when. It’s quite difficult to persuade people to really get stuck into this sort of thing, then do your own research and think for yourself, and then really understand why the lies-to-children are what they are. It’s like undoing brainwashing or something. Funnily enough I was contacted the other day by somebody who wanted to make YouTube videos. I should look into that.
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Uh oh, the Captcha has gone nuts again.
Thanks again John, and ” really bomb” news about the videos. I’ve been itching to see the newest Bill & Ted sci-fi-ish movie. At least this type of physics based fantasy and history is ” righteous fun”. Until next time, ” party on Dudes and Dudettes !”.
Every day, I get things like this in my Facebook feed:
https://ibb.co/HVZFkzp
Things like: “Is the Universe a simulation? Might the universe be a neural network? Why top physicist thinks we might not even exist! Click bait articles with catchy titles from Business Insider, Forbes, Futurism, Wired…
And then when I go to read them it all goes back to, you guessed it: The Standard Model, String Theory, and QED.
They’re part of the trouble with physics, Rick. The writers of these popscience articles are pumping out the pseudoscience and the propaganda and the cargo-cult woo. Meanwhile they don’t bite the hand that feeds them, and they will never admit that they’re spinning you a line. I think Quanta magazine is the worst. The only word I can think of to describe these people is charlatans.
Another trend I’ve been noticing, and I wonder if you’ve noticed it too, is a kind of anti-human, anti-creativity, pessimistic bent in the culture of pop science, like it seems tailored to making you think we’ll never reach progress. Two types of articles embody this concept. The first type of article is the one that gets your hopes up, only to dash them when you go into the article. It can be like this: “Novel propulsion system may be able to enable us to reach Alpha Centuari within a lifetime.” Or “warp drive, possible.” But then when you click on it, it takes you into some quantum weirdness, and ends by saying its basically impossible. One article by Kip Thorne about wormholes recently came to mind. “Don’t bother trying to travel through this wormhole though as a shortcut to the starts because you still have to transmit information the slow, light speed way, for Alice to get her message to Bob” or some nonsense like that. It all centers around hawking information paradox stuff.
The other type of article is the Doom article, that taps into your fear and alarm: “Kessler Syndrome may render space and all of modern civilization unaccessible for hundreds of years.” What the article WON’T tell you is all the current fixes governments and corporations are trying to do to stop it, like drag sails on new satellites being tested or nets to capture and de-orbit space junk. Instead it just leaves you cold and with a downer feeling in your gut. Until you go and do further research to find the stuff I mentioned. Or an article may go like: “Finding Extraterrestrial life may be harder than thought,” and when you go to read the article it talks about goldilocks zones of planets being shrunk by carbon monoxide in their atmospheres inhibiting complex life. And the little graphic inset shows Earth on the WARM edge of our goldilocks zone. Ah, the narrative: global warming. Or articles may say stuff like: “Why we indeed may be alone in the Universe.” Reading the article illustrates a mentality of: “We’re special, isn’t that great? That’s why its so important for us to take care of our planet.” I remember the days, used to be, when it was irrational Christians and Conservatives who argued for the Earth as being unique in the Universe for life because “no mention of alien life in the Bible.” Whereas the Liberal, Atheist, Skeptic science set would say stuff like: “Don’t be so arrogant and presumptuous as to think we’re the only planet that has life. That’s Chauvinism.” Now its the reverse, with the “Liberal-Left,” “Atheist” types saying stuff like “Bayesian and computer models predict that the probability of life developing outside of our planet is next to impossible” and “better take care of our planet because its the only game in town.” Not to mention an added sprinkle of fear sauce, referring again to computer models that say we’re going to go extinct in 12 years if we don’t stop driving our mopeds. Have you noticed this? This reversal? It seems like the so-called Atheistic, Left, Science, community has now turned to doomsday fearmongering combined with hopelessness. Don’t bother ever dreaming of going to Alpha Centuari because we’re just a blip of time and a non-important species that’s going to go extinct any time soon. But oh, wait! We’re a SPECIAL non-important species. And its all just a quantum simulation anyway.
Another trend I’ve been noticing, and I wonder if you’ve noticed it too, is a kind of anti-human, anti-creativity, pessimistic bent in the culture of pop science, like it seems tailored to making you think we’ll never reach progress. Two types of articles embody this concept. The first type of article is the one that gets your hopes up, only to dash them when you go into the article. It can be like this: “Novel propulsion system may be able to enable us to reach Alpha Centuari within a lifetime.” Or “warp drive, possible.” But then when you click on it, it takes you into some quantum weirdness, and ends by saying its basically impossible. One article by Kip Thorne about wormholes recently came to mind. “Don’t bother trying to travel through this wormhole though as a shortcut to the starts because you still have to transmit information the slow, light speed way, for Alice to get her message to Bob” or some nonsense like that. It all centers around hawking information paradox stuff.
The other type of article is the Doom article, that taps into your fear and alarm: “Kessler Syndrome may render space and all of modern civilization unaccessible for hundreds of years.” What the article WON’T tell you is all the current fixes governments and corporations are trying to do to stop it, like drag sails on new satellites being tested or nets to capture and de-orbit space junk. Instead it just leaves you cold and with a downer feeling in your gut. Until you go and do further research to find the stuff I mentioned. Or an article may go like: “Finding Extraterrestrial life may be harder than thought,” and when you go to read the article it talks about goldilocks zones of planets being shrunk by carbon monoxide in their atmospheres inhibiting complex life. And the little graphic inset shows Earth on the WARM edge of our goldilocks zone. Ah, the narrative: global warming. Or articles may say stuff like: “Why we indeed may be alone in the Universe.” Reading the article illustrates a mentality of: “We’re special, isn’t that great? That’s why its so important for us to take care of our planet.” I remember the days, used to be, when it was irrational Christians and Conservatives who argued for the Earth as being unique in the Universe for life because “no mention of alien life in the Bible.” Whereas the Liberal, Atheist, Skeptic science set would say stuff like: “Don’t be so arrogant and presumptuous as to think we’re the only planet that has life. That’s Chauvinism.” Now its the reverse, with the “Liberal-Left,” “Atheist” types saying stuff like “Bayesian and computer models predict that the probability of life developing outside of our planet is next to impossible” and “better take care of our planet because its the only game in town.” Not to mention an added sprinkle of fear sauce, referring again to computer models that say we’re going to go extinct in 12 years if we don’t stop driving our mopeds. Have you noticed this? This reversal? It seems like the so-called Atheistic, Left, Science, community has now turned to doomsday fearmongering combined with hopelessness. Don’t bother ever dreaming of going to Alpha Centuari because we’re just a blip of time and a non-important species that’s going to go extinct any time soon. But oh, wait! We’re a SPECIAL non-important species. And its all just a quantum simulation anyway.
Hey John, I’ve mentioned it before and I think it’s worth repeating. I highly recommend reading Thomas Kuhn’s essay “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.
It probably won’t change your opinion of the current state of physics, but I really do think it’ll enlighten you of the reasons science stagnates and of the role dogma plays in the progression of normative science.
This happens across science. Vaccines aren’t immune. [sidebar: they induce antibody immunity, but not so great at T-cell immunity, customer for life! Viruses don’t do anything unless we trick the immune system into responding via toxins like aluminum. And most obviously to any thinking physicist injuries don’t occur as a delta function (billions paid out in vaccine courts, means multibillions in lesser injuries in the population — that goes unpaid and uncounted!)]
Kuhn is good for explaining the conservatism of the average scientist. But to understand that blockage at the highest levels you must a system exists to control. And of course it would, do you think those who own the money supply and ability to print, wouldn’t spend on marketing and systems to propogandize and weoponize science. Again, only a dolt would believe they would not.
They control technology, and they pay to control and gate-keep science. Case in point Covid – hydroxychloroquine works (see Journal of Virology 2005 “Cloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS” or Fauci “Chloroquine is both a treatment and a vaccine.”) They poison us with chemistry (Roundup – even banned by Germany though Bayer owns Monsanto) and non-mainstream physics only happens in their special labs.
You mention religion. Be mindful, this system works extremely hard to ensure we don’t contemplate we have a soul, nor that it has power, and of course they like if we consider God implausible. They like to control everything.
You can bet the only place non-mainstream physics and technology on the earth if freely discussed, is in special labs owned and operated by THEM. THEY like that mainstream physics stays nicely contained in Schrodinger’s shoe box.
Another trend I’ve been noticing, and I wonder if you’ve noticed it too, is a kind of anti-human, anti-creativity, pessimistic bent in the culture of pop science, like it seems tailored to making you think we’ll never reach progress. Two types of articles embody this concept. The first type of article is the one that gets your hopes up, only to dash them when you go into the article. It can be like this: “Novel propulsion system may be able to enable us to reach Alpha Centuari within a lifetime.” Or “warp drive, possible.” But then when you click on it, it takes you into some quantum weirdness, and ends by saying its basically impossible. One article by Kip Thorne about wormholes recently came to mind. “Don’t bother trying to travel through this wormhole though as a shortcut to the starts because you still have to transmit information the slow, light speed way, for Alice to get her message to Bob” or some nonsense like that. It all centers around hawking information paradox stuff.
The other type of article is the Doom article, that taps into your fear and alarm: “Kessler Syndrome may render space and all of modern civilization unaccessible for hundreds of years.” What the article WON’T tell you is all the current fixes governments and corporations are trying to do to stop it, like drag sails on new satellites being tested or nets to capture and de-orbit space junk. Instead it just leaves you cold and with a downer feeling in your gut. Until you go and do further research to find the stuff I mentioned. Or an article may go like: “Finding Extraterrestrial life may be harder than thought,” and when you go to read the article it talks about goldilocks zones of planets being shrunk by carbon monoxide in their atmospheres inhibiting complex life. And the little graphic inset shows Earth on the WARM edge of our goldilocks zone. Ah, the narrative: global warming. Or articles may say stuff like: “Why we indeed may be alone in the Universe.” Reading the article illustrates a mentality of: “We’re special, isn’t that great? That’s why its so important for us to take care of our planet.” I remember the days, used to be, when it was irrational Christians and Conservatives who argued for the Earth as being unique in the Universe for life because “no mention of alien life in the Bible.” Whereas the Liberal, Atheist, Skeptic science set would say stuff like: “Don’t be so arrogant and presumptuous as to think we’re the only planet that has life. That’s Chauvinism.” Now its the reverse, with the “Liberal-Left,” “Atheist” types saying stuff like “Bayesian and computer models predict that the probability of life developing outside of our planet is next to impossible” and “better take care of our planet because its the only game in town.” Not to mention an added sprinkle of fear sauce, referring again to computer models that say we’re going to go extinct in 12 years if we don’t stop driving our mopeds. Have you noticed this? This reversal? It seems like the so-called Atheistic, Left, Science, community has now turned to doomsday fearmongering combined with hopelessness. Don’t bother ever dreaming of going to Alpha Centuari because we’re just a blip of time and a non-important species that’s going to go extinct any time soon. But oh, wait! We’re a SPECIAL non-important species. And its all just a quantum simulation anyway.
Hmm, I made another comment but for some reason it disappeared.
Rick: I’m awfully sorry, there were four of your comments in the spam folder. I use something called Akismet antispam, and it is far from perfect. It even chucks some of my comments in the spam folder, even when I don’t use dodgy words like v i a g r a.
Thank you. Now I’m like “oops! my comment appears multiple times,” and that’s from trying to re-submit it several times. It kept spitting back “duplicate comment, you’ve already said this before” and I thought it was the Captcha malfunctioning. Now I want to apologize. Thanks for clarifying what it was and posting the comment.
Navid,
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You’re correct about antibody response being the metric for vaccine development rather than T-cell response. This is well understood in the community as a fault in vaccine development. You can find plenty of discussion about this topic in the NCBI.
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I’d encourage you to learn more about adjuvants.
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Billions paid in vaccine courts? That’s meaningless.
Is court settlement proof of causality? What’s the average payout? What’s the typical injury warranting settlement? What’s the injury rate per dose of vaccine? What’s the rate per person? Is the dollar amount of settlement a good measure of actual cost and opportunity cost of injury? Is the injury cost of vaccination greater than the injury cost of disease?
4.15 billion dollars sounds scary, but that’s over 29+ years with an average payout of around $400,000 with over 3 million doses of vaccines distributed each year. This rough overestimate puts the injury case rate at 1 in 10,000 doses, and a case injury rate of hundreds of people per year in the US. How’s this compare to other drugs? To the thousands hospitalized in the US per year due to ibuprofen? To the injury rate of diseases effectively controlled by vaccines?
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All of this information is easily available.
There are significant problems with how modern science and medicine operate, but your arguments are bad.
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On hydroxychloroquine:
Is our ignorance of its efficacy due to conspiracy, or a failure of our experimental drug development system relying on compassionate use laws?
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Out of curiosity, how much Kuhn have you read?
Kripke?
Feyerabend?
Edit: I think my numbers for the number of vaccine doses distributed in the US are off by a factor of 100. Should have been 300 million doses. Which puts the case injury rate at 1 in 1,000,000 doses.
Eric,
Only a good look at the evidence will help you crack the case on these topics. Without an understanding of that we are left trying to use logic — our minds can truly argue any opinion. Anything can be anything. In physics, we are now creating world views and doing meta-physics… meanwhile there are physical experiments that go unexplained (LENR being an obvious area).
Vaccine court is a Kangaroo court in the US. It requires an assault of tremendous proportion – and within tightly defined timeframes sometimes into hours after administration. https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/hrsa/vaccine-compensation/vaccine-injury-table.pdf
Anyone who understands real world data realizes that for many reasons – there is no chance most people are going to qualify for an injury within these bounds. Even if they knew there was an injury at all. Slight ataxia of the limbs, a subtle cognitive deficit — these go unaccounted. Every type of toxification occurs on a long tail — and we are compensating a delta function. Integrate injuries over time and type and we have an epidemic. There is zero, and I mean zero chance that the natural incidence of measles or chicken pox was a public health threat – of course, you will need to understand much more about disease to come to this conclusion.
Vaccine injuries in general go vastly unreported – because less than 1 in 100 people even know vaccines can cause injuries at all (and we can include physicians in that). Having had a kid with febrile seizure, allergies, eczema, and sudden strange episode of inability to walk on one leg — and having gone to neurologists and pediatricians – nowhere in the chain of years of that investigation did anyone ever, ever say it MIGHT be a vaccine injury or toxification in general. I am 6 years on from all of that, and my kids seems fine now — and the years of ventolin and steroids is over thank goodness. It is only in the last months I even came to this awareness. The only thing we never, ever, questioned was vaccines. Can I “prove it” – definitely not in a Kangoroo court – I won’t even bring this up with the pediatrician because patients can’t train their doctors to look at the evidence.
Sounds “anecdotal” — but when you see that over and over – you have a trend — and such a trend exists at global scale. That’s how it can take decades for us to discover fluoride is as serious as lead for human toxicity and many other things which are definitively true in science but scientists believe are not true.
The failure of HCQ is the control system discrediting a drug despite vast amounts of data, from published studies and from observation at scale. Few drugs in world history have been administered and used so quickly — thus we are talking about a control system trying to blot out the truth from media (and all modern media channels like Google, Facebook). The Lancet study is one example of an event we’ve never seen – disinformation fraud – but the authors got caught.
Navid,
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You claim that there’s no chance small pox or measles was a public health threat? I don’t believe that. How did you come to that conclusion? What’s your data and reasoning?
Eric,
Not a public health threat means that measles and chicken pox (I did not say smallpox!) can be handled by our medical system just fine.
https://physiciansforinformedconsent.org/measles/
Then watch Vaccine Re-Education 1 & 2 by Dr. Suzanne Humphries (a mainstream physician who went on her own vaccine discovery process, due to seeing things with her patients). She is also a physicist, and not someone you can mess with. I dare you to look at her data, not source opinions on the matter.
https://www.youtube.com/c/DrSuzanneHumphries/videos
Navid,
Sorry, yes. Chicken pox.
What do you mean by “can be handled by our medical system just fine?” Either we’re basing that off of a tolerable number of case injuries, or we need to compare case injury rate of measles to the case injury rate of the measles vaccine. Or maybe treatment cost of measles injury vs treatment cost MMR vaccination injury? Whatever your metric, let’s be more precise in our caparisons than those pamphlets you pointed me to.
Those pamphlets from the PIC are full of implicit conflation and obfuscation. I don’t have time to refute them point by point (a 1 in 640 febrile seizure rate due to MMR vaccination sounds awful, but compare that to a 1 in 5 febrile seizure background rate). They rely on sounding authoritative while being incredibly selective about the information provided in order to prevent rational comparison. They are persuasive, NOT informative in presentation. Not to say that they’re wrong, exactly (or rather that they provide counterfactual premises) but they certainly enthymematically imply non sequitur or counterfactual conclusions.
I really don’t think I can argue this with you. Neither of us (I assume) are trained in epidemiology (neither are physicists, typically) and I won’t bullshit like these antivaccers, so I’ll never be as persuasive, especially as just some anonymous guy on the internet. If you’ve read Kuhn (have you?) you’ll understand that our models for the world are, in this instance, incommensurable.
Navid: this is not some anti-vaxxer website. Before the advent of modern medicine, just about half of all children used to die from disease. People were afraid to love their children, because half of them wouldn’t make it. Now please note the title of this article, and please try to stay on topic.
I have some questions relating to learning physics when it comes to the information presented in this blog. I am trying to learn how to do physics, and all the maths involved, by taking course playlists on Youtube. I am on this one in particular, MIT Open Courseware Quantum Physics. But I have followed playlists from Leonard Susskind in Stanford University’s Youtube channel, as well as the Khan Academy. But most of these classes teach the Standard Model, and all the mathematics that comes with it, including QED, and they start talking about probabilities of wave functions, and entanglement, and Bell’s Theorem. You go down a sequence that leads you to the Mainstream Standard Model. How would I go about learning, and doing, physics, with THIS information instead. Already I’m on lecture 5 of this MIT video series and the guy is already saying “point particles.” He is talking about the spin of photons, up and down, and writing the Dirac Notation on the board. I wonder if there are lecture series you can find where they teach electrons and protons as photons traveling in knots, and where they talk about the Einstein deHaas Effect. And where they teach about how gravity works, variable speed of light, etc? So that one can learn how to do the correct physics and begin to do engineering and lab work with these concepts in mind. Would you at some point consider doing an open course ware, Youtube playlist type of thing, about how to do physics and maths and move up through these ideas? That would be helpful to a lot of people, I think.
Rick: I’m sorry, but there’s no clear-cut mathematical course for the physics I’m giving you here. There are bits and piece in contemporary textbooks, or in online courses like at MIT. But none of them will give you the foundations you need, and they quickly lead you astray into mathematical fairy tales. Are there any lecture series that talk about electrons being trivial-knot photons? Or that teach you that spin is real? Or how gravity works via the variable speed of light? Not that I know of. But you could read the old papers I refer to in the various articles. Let me know if any of the hyperlinks don’t work any more.
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Would I consider doing an open course ware Youtube playlist type of thing? Yes. Unfortunately I’ve found that I have less free time of late, so don’t hold your breath. And do note that my maths is relatively weak – it goes a little past A-level, but not much. Besides, I don’t think you can use lines of mathematical symbols to describe and explain the physics. You can use it within a physics theory to make predictions and vindicate that theory. As such, maths is a vital tool for physics. But it isn’t what physics is. For example, you know that ∇ × E = −∂B/∂t. But you can read the whole of Jackson and you still won’t understand that the equals sign is an “is”. Because he doesn’t tell you about the screw nature of electromagnetism. However maybe one day somebody else will rewrite that book, and maybe they will. Maybe they’ll also talk about the electromagnetic field in chapter 1 instead of chapter 11. That’s where Jackson said “one should properly speak of the electromagnetic field Fµv rather than E or B separately”. Quite. So why didn’t you say that in chapter one, John? Instead of writing a book that taught electromagnetism as if Maxwell’s unification never happened?
Rick,
You won’t find any course that covers material that shares the ontology affirmed by this blog, and that’s for good reason.
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Science may be intrinsically methodological, but it certainly extrinsically obeys no consistent methodology. (I’d suggest Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method for a casual discussion, or his 4 volumes of Philosophical Papers for a more serious treatment). Science as a whole, over many generations is not a process directed towards truth, rather it seems much more chaotically evolved under selection for ability to efficiently solve puzzles. You will find much debate about criteria for comparison of Scientific paradigms, whether ontology or predictions or precision or number of free variables holds precedence, but the answer seems, historically, that all of these are no more than weak proxies for the criteria of puzzle making and puzzle solving within a theory.
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A new theory is selected if and only if it is believed to be able to provide the scientific community with a large number of solveable problems. That’s why the current quantum paradigm, build on easy linear algebra, was able to rise to prominence despite being fundamentally bereft any reasonable ontology. Would an integral formalism over the probability space of the inner products of a wave function and a measurement function produce the same theory without any of the “quantum spookiness” we’ve all grown so tired of? Probably. But the mathematical framework is too difficult and opaque to rival the progress that the linear algebra paradigm promised.
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Why doesn’t mainstream research pursue the internal structure of electrons? Because that’s only significantly important in scattering experiments, and a simple ad hoc extension to the theory (quark chromodynamics) allowed for continued progression of the field. Is it right? It doesn’t matter. All that matters (to the field) is that it presented solvable problems. Tensor or spinor mechanics, clifford algebras, and other attempts to understand the nature of an electron as a toriodal object simply failed to produce new solvable problems to the scientific community, and were thusly set aside. So instead we pretend that an electron is a field of probability when convenient, a point particle other times, an infinite number of point particles when we’re feeling brave, and a heaviside ellipsoid when we’re feeling frisky. An electron is only a dirac spinor when we’re drunk and don’t care that we can’t actually do science with that model.
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The stagnation were seeing in physics is characteristic of a bloated theory weighed down by too many and too arbitrary of ad hoc corrections. The next theory will hopefully get closer to the truth, whatever that means, but it’ll have some serious hurdles to get through. It had better be simple enough to understand and teach, present new problems and a methodology for solving such problems, and conform close enough with past models to not disenfranchise the practitioners of the older science. Those are some significant hurdles, and while John here may see some promising paths to pursue, I’d bet not even a tenth of a percent of the work needed to build a new theory from this paths has been done.
Eric: this is the crux of it: “Is it right? It doesn’t matter”. It does matter. Because we do science to understand the world, and to make the world a better place. And because it’s the wave nature of matter. We have hard scientific evidence of this. We made the electron out of light in pair production, we can diffract electrons, as per the Davisson-Germer experiment and the Thomson and Reid diffraction experiment. We can refract electrons, we can perform electron optics with electrons, and when we annihilate the electron with a positron, what we get is light. And yet, people say the electron is a point particle, or some spooky mystical thing made of probability, because they stick to their “easy linear algebra” which is “bereft any reasonable ontology”. Because “the mathematical framework is too difficult” to do it right. That’s absurd. That’s insane. That’s not science.
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Rick: you won’t find any course that covers material that shares the ontology affirmed by this blog. But it’s not for any good reason. Make sure you read the old papers by Mie, de Broglie, Schrodinger, Darwin, and Born and Infeld. Use the search option to find them. Please let me know if any links don’t work.
John:
You are absolutely right that this is the crux of the matter.
“[Are scientific theories] right? Does it matter?”
I think this question is extremely important to understand if you want to effectively criticize science.
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As a structure, science is often misunderstood. Science is the best process we’ve developed for developing and progressing theories that correspond more and more closely with reality, yet it does so with obvious disregard for what might be called “reasonableness” in its theories. I think that what you see as a major flaw in science is fundamentally twofold; the inability to disentangle observation from theoretical framework and the struggle with the central economic problem: How to allocate finite resources.
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I think that for any critique of science to be effective, it must be informed by the difficulties of progressing science. Science as a whole faces a trade off between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of progress. There exists no method by which scientific theory can correspond directly to reality. (I’d again recommend you read Feyerabend’s Against Method for a discussion of this topic.) Any measurement taken to support or falsify a theory is necessarily and inherently informed by and interpreted within a scientific theory. The best that can be done is to compare theories, but there is no consensus of which criteria should be used. Do we value consistency of a theory to previous measurements, or do we value “simplicity and elegance”? Can we reasonably prove that nature obeys some human notion of either? Is falsification more or less important than the ability to derive old theory from the framework of the new? Where does the criteria of free parameters fall in the hierarchy of this comparison? Instead, science progresses the best way it can; by pursuing progress. Hence, if a theory promises to create solvable problems, it seems to be favored by the scientific community. I think that this is important to understand when leveling criticism against a theory. For many a theorist, this inability to directly know or prove the “reality” of a theory is understood, and criticizing a theory on these grounds will not convince anyone because of the lack of a better option: If I can’t know reality, and science has a track record of consistently appearing to pursue truth by proxy, well my best bet is to throw my chips in with what we currently know as science.
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None of this explains the scientific community’s resistance to new theories. New theories are risky: they divert researchers’ time to reconstruct and restate old problems before they can be verified and used for new progress. This is an economic problem, but not economic in terms of money (modern science has many of those problems; particle colliders) but rather economic in terms of allocation of resources. The economic problem of science is, with a finite set of resources (researchers, computational power, time and funding) into which fields and sub-disciplines should these resources be allocated in order to progress science the most efficiently. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned problem with the lack of direct correspondence between theory and reality, the adherence to a hardline philosophy of ontological justification first and always, would come at a significant price. The same messy, democratically imprecise science that approved of quark-gluon plasma and quantum chromodynamics, also paved the way for research into very precise measurement of the emergence of mass in non quantized twisted EM fields, which I hope will soon reinvigorate some of these theories you’ve been interested.
Eric: I don’t want to criticize science. I want to criticize what’s presented as science, but isn’t really science. I “believe” in science. I think the scientific method is hugely important. But nowadays we have people talking about things that can never be disproven, for which there is no evidence. They are peddling speculation and conjecture as it’s proven fact when it absolutely is not.
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I don’t see the major flaw as twofold: 1) the inability to disentangle observation from theoretical framework and 2) the struggle with the central economic problem. I think the major flaw with science is that it’s conducted by selfish people who have a vested interest in bad science and wrong theory, and who actively stand in the way of good science and correct theory. I know plenty of professional physicists who simply cannot get their paper into Nature, because Nature is part of a “protection racket”.
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No, I don’t think science faces a trade-off between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of progress. I think what it faces is people who stand opposed to both truth and progress, because they’ve backed the wrong horse, and they will not admit that they were wrong. These are the people who tell lies to children, and who try to censor the people who don’t.
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There exists no method by which scientific theory can correspond directly to reality.
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Phooey. We have wave mechanics. It’s the wave nature of matter, we have hard experimental evidence for that. And yet some particle physicist will tell you the electron is a point-particle.
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I’d again recommend you read Feyerabend’s Against Method for a discussion of this topic.
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I’ve looked at excerpts and summaries. I don’t think I would agree with him. So I don’t feel like spending £25 to buy a copy of his book.
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Any measurement taken to support or falsify a theory is necessarily and inherently informed by and interpreted within a scientific theory.
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I disagree. Sorry Eric. But a measurement is a measurement.
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the best that can be done is to compare theories, but there is no consensus of which criteria should be used. Do we value consistency of a theory to previous measurements, or do we value “simplicity and elegance”? Can we reasonably prove that nature obeys some human notion of either? Is falsification more or less important than the ability to derive old theory from the framework of the new? Where does the criteria of free parameters fall in the hierarchy of this comparison? Instead, science progresses the best way it can; by pursuing progress.
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Only it doesn’t. It dreams up expensive experiments that yield a bump on a graph and then proclaims that this proves the existence of some particle whose existence was inferred, and that the latter proves the existence of some mechanism proposed as a kludge for a theory of massive short range messenger particles, which started as a theory with symmetry, but when that didn’t work was morphed into a theory with broken symmetry. Even though messenger particles do not actually exist, and said mechanism flatly contradicts E=mc².
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Hence, if a theory promises to create solvable problems, it seems to be favored by the scientific community. I think that this is important to understand when levelling criticism against a theory. For many a theorist, this inability to directly know or prove the “reality” of a theory is understood, and criticizing a theory on these grounds will not convince anyone because of the lack of a better option: If I can’t know reality, and science has a track record of consistently appearing to pursue truth by proxy, well my best bet is to throw my chips in with what we currently know as science.
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I think your best bet is not be an apologist for bad science that isn’t science at all.
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None of this explains the scientific community’s resistance to new theories. New theories are risky: they divert researchers’ time to reconstruct and restate old problems before they can be verified and used for new progress. This is an economic problem…
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No it isn’t an economic problem. The particle physics community is resistant to new theories (which are really old theories going back to Schrodinger etc) because they would demonstrate that the theory they’ve been promoting for fifty years was always wrong.
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but not economic in terms of money (modern science has many of those problems; particle colliders) but rather economic in terms of allocation of resources. The economic problem of science is, with a finite set of resources (researchers, computational power, time and funding) into which fields and sub-disciplines should these resources be allocated in order to progress science the most efficiently. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned problem with the lack of direct correspondence between theory and reality, the adherence to a hardline philosophy of ontological justification first and always, would come at a significant price. The same messy, democratically imprecise science that approved of quark-gluon plasma and quantum chromodynamics, also paved the way for research into very precise measurement of the emergence of mass in non quantized twisted EM fields, which I hope will soon reinvigorate some of these theories you’ve been interested.
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All points noted Eric. IMHO the messy, democratically imprecise “science” that approved of quark-gluon plasma and quantum chromodynamics, is not science. I say that because I’m confident that I understand what charge is. If you don’t know what charge is, it isn’t scientific to propose color charge, is it? And don’t forget that even to this day we have never seen a free quark. And no fairies either. PS: if you believe in “quark confinement”, I’ve got a bridge you might like to buy.
What’s your purpose with this line of argumentation in general? Are you hoping to convince researchers and theorists within the scientific community to pursue a different theory? If so, I think you won’t be effective unless you approach them from the understanding that, (while there’s no doubt that there’s protectionism of the current models because of very human vices like pride and money) those in the scientific community do believe that these theories are really science, and you’ll have to understand that they view the allocation of research into such undeveloped theories as VSL as a risk and a cost to current research. Not understanding that, I think you’ll continue to find it nearly impossible to persuade many people who are already established in science.
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Is your purpose instead to broaden the appeal of these theories to hopefully encourage other to join in pursuing a revolution in science back to sensible theories? if that’s the case your cynicism that is insensitive to the realities of theory creation and adoption will turn people away who would otherwise be sympathetic to your preferred view. Why? Well when someone naïve to the particulars of each theory comes across your work and finds you in dispute with nearly every established and published researcher in the field, a decision has to be made in who to trust. Despite name dropping Einstein and Schoedinger (which, not saying it is, but it may, come across as appeal to authority) the naïve probability that you are right and (almost) everyone else is wrong seems very low. To explain how they can all be so wrong without coming across as a baseless conspiracy theorist, I think takes a little more nuanced of an understanding for why science has gotten to where it is today, and how something like quark confinement, which may not even be true, can still be science. Definitions are slippery things, and meaning of a word is complex. The meaning of “science” to you and to others may be different while still referencing the same practice. Saulk Kripke’s Naming and Necessityis a good read for a better understanding of modal logic and language.
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Let me briefly address one of your contentions with my argument. I claimed that the resistance to new theories is due to an economic problem, and you claim that it’s for more personal reasons: the unwillingness of a community to admit it’s pursued the wrong path for the past fifty years. I honestly agree with you, but I’m also unwilling to concede my case. I think that both can be simultaneously true, however no change will come from shaming a community into change without providing alternative models that promise immediate and realizable progress.
Eric: my purpose is to get science back on track. Yes, I’d like to persuade researchers and theorists to pursue a different theory. But I don’t think I can ever persuade the Weinbergs of this world. Even if I approach them from the understanding that current theory really is science, or appreciate that they view the allocation of research into things like VSL as a risk and cost to current research. I will never persuade those with vested interest in current theory to admit they were wrong. I am not looking to persuade “the establishment”. I’m looking to persuade the younger physicists who want to make a difference.
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Yes, my purpose is “to broaden the appeal of these theories to hopefully encourage other to join in pursuing a revolution in science back to sensible theories”. I’m sorry if you feel that my “cynicism that is insensitive to the realities of theory creation and adoption will turn people away who would otherwise be sympathetic to your preferred view”. It isn’t cynicism, it’s more like anger. Anger that modern general relativity flatly contradicts Einstein’s original, which included VSL. And anger that this is not only not acknowledged, but is actively censored. There is no need to decide whether to trust me or nearly every established and published researcher in the field. All you have to do is read the Einstein digital papers. Dismissing what Einstein said as some “appeal to authority” just doesn’t cut it. Nor does claiming that the probability that I’m right must be very low. The evidence is there in the NIST optical clocks.
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It’s similar for the wave nature of matter and the electron plus the papers by Schrodinger and others such as Born and Infeld. Those papers say what they say. It’s no conspiracy theory to point out things like this: “the inner angular momentum plays evidently a similar role to the spin in the usual theory of the electron. But it has some great advantages: it is an integral of the motion and has a real physical meaning as a property of the electromagnetic field, whereas the spin is defined as an angular momentum of an extensionless point, a rather mystical assumption”. I reject your claim that it takes a more nuanced understanding for why science has gotten to where it is today. I’m sorry Eric, but there is no nuance to scientific fraud.
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I’m pleased you agree that resistance to new theories is due to an unwillingness of a community to admit it’s pursued the wrong path for fifty years. I hope that if you read the material I’ve put up here you will also agree that I have provided information on alternative models that promise immediate and realizable progress. Only they aren’t my models. I’ve added a little here and there, and tried to arrange the pieces of the jigsaw to show the big picture. But it wasn’t me who came up with the variable speed of light, or the wave nature of matter, or the notion that spin is real.
To be honest John, most of my criticisms in these comments comes from a personal desire to see these arguments formulated stronger, because I completely agree that modern physics is in crisis; lost in abstractions and free parameters, and I am frustrated in the distance yet to be covered in develping a theory that can compete with the current paradigm for attention in the scientific community. I found and started reading your blog from the beginning at the same time as a professor was teaching our class about “quantum erasers”. She was putting on such theater to impress upon us the “spookiness” that Q Physics tells us is “reality” yet to me it was entirely unbelievable that we were talking about anything more “mystical” (prof’s words, not mine) than polarizers behaving like polarizers. Your blog was a breath of fresh air: refusing to to be convinced that spin isn’t real, or that pair production involves an infinite number of virtual particles whose positive mass sums up to -1/12. Unfortunately this VSL paradigm just didn’t pass muster with the rest of the scientific community, and it won’t without the thousands of man hours required to develope the case for a model like this. In that pursuit I think we need to push eachother to be more rigorous and nuanced in our arguments.
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Complete aside:
What do you think of Stephan Wolfram’s physics project?
That’s good stuff Eric. Apologies if I’ve misread some of the things you’ve said previously. I suppose the VSL is something of a test case here. It seems to be very difficult to persuade physicists that something they can’t see, does not exist, and that they should instead look closely at the hard scientific empirical evidence that’s right there in front of their nose: optical clocks go slower when they’re lower. Not because some magical mysterious thing called “time” goes slower at the lower location, but because light goes slower when it’s lower, just like Einstein said. I find the unwillingness to countenance this to be on a par with Young Earth Creationists, and utterly astonishing. What I’d like to do is SLAP the physicist in the face, and say now look at the evidence. But it seems like I just can’t reach him. People are so convictional. Sometimes I wonder if there’s anybody home, if you catch my drift.
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What do I think of Stephen Wolfram’s physics project? I think it’s self-indulgent mathematical handwaving, with the sole intention of promoting Stephen Wolfram. The guy is putting mathematical abstraction on a pedestal and treating it as if it’s more real than the thing it’s modelling. He’s mistaking the map for the territory. See what he says about energy here: “The technical statement is: energy corresponds to the flux of causal edges through spacelike hypersurfaces”. And see this about mass: “And now we’re saying that the flux of causal edges specifically in the timelike direction corresponds to rest mass”. That isn’t physics. That’s crap. He hasn’t got a f*cking clue.
John, you have to realize this is all on purpose and all connected. Yes they see us as sheep to be fleeced. Not just in physics. EVERYWHERE. The same group of parasites that is ultimately responsible for holding physics back is also responsible for starting wars, for spreading diseases and hiding the remedies, for creating money out of thin air that they then use to control and enslave us. The purpose of these parasites is to suck our energy, in a more literal sense than you think. They control us through the knowledge that they have and that they hide from us. Sounds too big to be true? Deep down I think you know it to be true.
They have a deeper understanding of physics than we do. Academia is there to hide the key to the real knowledge, to lose inquiring minds into a maze of illusions. Those who work in academia are useful cogs in this monumental system of control and energy-sucking, they don’t know better, most of them think they’re working for good, just like most policemen think they’re working for good while they’re furthering the establishment of an evil totalitarian system.
Know your enemy, see through the illusions. This is a battle to free humanity. This battle plays among other things in the field of knowledge. Find the key and their system of control tumbles down. Keep fighting the good fight.
Sorry light, whilst I’m 100% sure there are people who see us as sheep to be fleeced, I don’t buy the idea that they’re all connected. Nor the idea that most policemen think they’re working for good while they’re furthering the establishment of an evil totalitarian system. I know some policemen, they really are working for good, and they aren’t working for some evil totalitarian system.
There is some irony in your response. First, the type of collusive dark force that gets $6.7 Trillion spent on middle east post-911 wars — that’s a lot of tax dollars! This isn’t my opinion – https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
You arguments apply. Is there any evidence that people are good, but they are complicit in doing evil via their dollars from governments and corporations. Of course, few of us ever take any initiative to learn about this. At the level of policeman, mailman, doctor, and even physics professor it is impossible to see the workings at the ultra-elite (top 10,000 or so people) level.
Anyway, it is the same way nobody believes there is evil in keeping physics from progressing. Of course, there is such evil but out of hundreds of thousands of physicists yes, they really are working for good and would reject the claims on your website as conspiracy theory.
Au contraire Navid, physicists complain to me that they can’t get their papers published. Or they get studiously ignored. As for the claims on this website, Einstein said what he said, so did Schrodinger and Born and Infeld and all those other guys. It’s a matter of public record. Not some conspiracy.
Dear Light,
I think you are on the right track. But the system looks too big to fail to most. Most people come to the understanding that something must change, way down in their career — where they have been chizzled down by reality into being quite risk averse. The young people are the key. They hold onto them tightly…
If you are interested in practical breakthrough physics reach out.
Hey, Navid,
Are you perchance familiar with the grand unified theory of classical quantum mechanics?
Yes. We’re working on trying to make use of it.
John, have you read the theoretical work of Wilhelm Hagen? You might find it interesting.
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Wilhelm F. Hagen “Matter in the form of toroidal electromagnetic vortices”, Proc. SPIE 9570, The Nature of Light: What are Photons? VI, 95700T (10 September 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2192141
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His website seems offline, but a copy, as well as the documents, still exist here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170626014520/http://www.energiewirbel.com/
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Hagen unfortunately passed away in 2019.
https://thesiuslawnews.com/article/wilhelm-f-hagen
Many thanks for that, Bantoni. That looks interesting. I’m surprised I didn’t know about that, because I looked at the SPIE stuff in https://physicsdetective.com/what-is-a-photon/. Ah, the material I looked at was from 2008, this is from 2015. How sad he’s no longer with us. I’ve downloaded the paper and will read it with interest. Thanks again.
everything you say is true, unfortunately I cant trust humans with the truth
There are some serious issues there, Dave. People are so very convictional.
If you are interested in investigating where things began to go awry, I have a paper on the Michelson-Morley experiment that you may find helpful (if you read it with an open mind): https://nathanrapport.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/classical_doppler_michelson_morley-2.pdf
Good luck with your quest for truth.
Nathan: sure, I’ll take a look.
Hello again. I’ve updated and expanded the paper with more analysis: https://nathanrapport.files.wordpress.com/2022/06/classical_doppler_michelson_morley-1.pdf
Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you Nathan. I have had insufficient free time recently. I hope this will change soon.
No problem. It will probably take a lot less time than you think once you start reading, because the math is pretty straightforward.
If you want a short summary, I made a one-pager with a diagram here:
There’s a lot more supporting information and analysis in the paper though.
I just found your blog when I searched for the Oliver Consa paper, Something rotten in QED. I’m wondering why you have not written about the Hestenes’ paper which adds to Consa’s Helical Solenoid paper, Zitterbewegung Structure in Electrons and Photons? I am also wondering why you have not written about Ulf Klein’s work in the foundations, his paper From Probabilistic Classical Mechanics to Quantum Theory in particular, but also his What is the limit, \hbar \to \infty, of Quantum Mechanics. I’ve written about these on Quora, of course, but my Quora answers tend to get about 100 views max. And even there, it generally takes a year or better!
I am remiss, Wes. I’ve read some of David Hestenes’ papers, such as The Zitterbewegung Interpretation of
Quantum Mechanics (http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf-preAdobe8/ZBW_I_QM.pdf#:~:text=David%20Hestenes%20Abstract.%20The%20zitterbewegung%20is%20a%20local,negative%20energy%20states%20as%20originally%20proposed%20by%20Schroedinger.), and John Williamson told me about him. However I only give him a couple of mentions in passing. I shall have to redress that.
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I don’t know about Ulf Klein I’m afraid. I presume it this guy: https://arxiv.org/search/quant-ph?searchtype=author&query=Klein%2C+U . I’ll take a look.
Yeah, that’s Ulf Klein: https://www.tphys.jku.at/group/klein/klein.html
The reason why I mention him, in his paper, The Helical Solenoid Model of Electron (http://www.ptep-online.com/2018/PP-53-06.PDF), Professor Consa states:
“If we assume that Einstein was correct, and that QM is only applicable to groups of particles, . . .”
Klein proves that in his paper From Probabilistic Mechanics to Quantum Theory. He develops a fully general theory of Probabilistic Mechanics on Phase Space and then reduces this to a kinematic theory. He then adds a redundant, but necessary, action which governs the dynamics on phase space and couples this action to the probability density. What he ends up with is a classical theory with the same mathematical structure as QM. He then uses a really simple projection to state space, deriving the key components of QM! It’s beautiful work! He shows quite clearly that the complex algebra is necessitated by the coupling between the action and the density and the desire for linearity. He also shows that the Planck’s constant only becomes meaningful upon the projection to state space, which strongly supports Hestenes’/Consa’s work. Currently he is working on a more complex projection using momentum fields which results in spiin 1/2 particles. Oh, and of course he shows that QM is an ensemble theory – proves it!
I also recently read this paper by some young kid in New Zealand, a PhD thesis in which he suggests using the Lorentz factor as a spacetime entropy measure. This got to thinking – danger, danger, danger, and I realized that the velocities inherent to the de Broglie matter waves actually contain the Lorentz factor. Lec v_g be the group velocity or you might say the wave envelope velocity, and let v_w be the superposition or phase velocity. Then, as has been shown numerous times (it’s in the Feynman Lecture 48), v_g moves at the same velocity as the particle but v_w is superluminal at v_w = c^2/v_g. So now, look at the difference between these multiplied by the inverse of v_w; it’s the square of the Lorentz factor. My suggestion was to use this to model a spacetime field analogous to how M. C. Parker and C. Jeynes modeled information/entropy fields in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46765-w; it could very well be that particles carry spacetime along with them!
I would also like to know what Professor Consa thinks of this 2014 paper I found in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys2816), in which the authors simulate a magnetic charge using a nano-needle perched over an aperture. They show that electrons interacting with this simulated magnetic charge actually change state and become vortex electrons. Consider that in conjunction with this from Professor Hestenes’ paper:
“Though a properly tuned magnetic resonance measurement may activate toroidal zitter in the electron, external fields are not necessary to maintain it. If the toroidal zitter can be quenched or activated at will, then the electron has at least two distinguishable internal states and might thereby serve as the ultimate magnetic storage device.”
I’m just really curious as to what Professor Consa makes of that and I saw where he commented on your blog, so maybe he’ll take a look.
But yeah, David Hestenes surely deserves your attention. That latest paper of his is just glorious, a complete unification of classical and quantum electrodynamics! And I found this other inspiring paper, On spacetime foliations and electromagnetic knots (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.09259.pdf). You see from above, with the Lorentz factor hidden in the de Broglie waves, that defines a global time.
Also, I’m currently learning Geometric Algebra with its Calculus right now, using Professor Hestenes’ New Foundations textbook, and it’s leaps and bounds better than the Gibbs formalism. All that nonsense you go through defining chains and transforming chains is eliminated; you get bonus identities with every derivation of standard identities, due to the geometric product; and spinors, spinor, spinors. I could go on and on. I’d love to see an article addressing that. In mathematics it’s all about finding the optimal balance between expressive power and ambiguity and Geometric Algebra has considerably more expressive power with no additional ambiguity, so why the resistence?
Just so you know, I posted a longer comment with 6 or so links prior to the above and it says it’s awaiting moderation, probably due to the links.
It was in the Pending folder Wes. I approved it. It’s showing now. There’s some interesting stuff there, I’ll get back to you properly later. I took a look at the latest Ulf Klein paper and thought why is he talking about probability? I read the discussion at the end and didn’t feel much accord. But maybe that’s just me. I’ll put more time into it.
He’s talking about probability because he’s showing precisely how quantum theory, a probabilistic theory, emerges as a substructure of a classical probabilistic kinematics, so there is a probability density that needs to be addressed. The only difference between standard classical probabilistic kinematics and his HLLK theory is the coupling between the density and the action and this, complex amplitudes, is really what distinguishes quantum theory; these just ARE what we call quantum information! And I think the reason this coupling is necessary is entirely due to non-classical correlations – entanglement.
“I read the discussion at the end and didn’t feel much accord.”
I find his items 1 – 7 rather compelling myself, but this doesn’t mean that I am in accord with Quantum Theory! What I am most definitely in accord with is his very robust demonstration that Quantum Theory is an ensemble theory and predictively incomplete, just as Einstein et. al. claimed (proved?). You take that in conjunction with the work of Professor Consa and Professor Hestenes and you also find that Bohr et. al. were wrong about metaphysical incompleteness as well; David Hestenes clearly demonstrates that with his Maxwell-Dirac theory, especially if you take into account the very respectable amount of empirical support it enjoys.
But yeah, it takes awhile to properly digest all of this and I’m certainly hoping you and a few others who read your blog take the time to do so; I have found it a fascinating journey. And I’m glad I found your blog! Although I haven’t figured out how to subscribe to it yet . . .
Hi John,
It has been a while since I posted, I hope you are doing well. In the mean time I have read most of your book, and as you said since it was capturing your insight at that moment , probably this blog contains a more up-to-date view and also allows interaction. I do like to have a physical book and fully aware of the limitations, but the amount of topics you cover is really impressive, especially since so many go against the mainstream ideas.
We also talked about the typical response from the “scientists” that demand proof for your ideas, and for that reason I think it would be good if you maybe try to go deeper and come up with explanatary theories about the universe. 2 topics I think are very interesting and probably key in unlocking everything else: 1. the nature of the photon (which is actually perturbation of the aether, so actually you are explaining the aether): why is the amplitude the value it has, and related to that the shape of electron, proton,…
2. the fine structure constant. In your book you have an interesting idea about the fact it is related to the kissing number, I dont think you have it discussed here on the blog. The reason why I found it interesting is because the geometric structure (which is my passion thinking about the aether) that is related to this is the rhombic dodecahedron (honeycomb), which together with cubic tesselation can fully describe the (de)form(ation) of the aether…. the factor 1/11.7, where did you get that from, or you derived that from the fine structure constant? If you could calculate that factor independently and it matches the experimental result that would be a breakthrough, NO?
All the best, Raf
Thanks Raf. Yes, I’m fine thanks. I hope you are too. And yes, this blog contains a lot more than Relativity+. I’ve just flipped through the latter, and I reckon it’s a bit lightweight now. However I don’t think there’s much that’s flat out wrong. I described a gravitational field as a tension gradient, whilst now I’d say pressure gradient, and I’m sure there’s other issues, but hey, it was fun, and I hope it still is. Something I’ve learned a lot about since 2009 is just what a load of tosh mainstream physics is. Quantum mechanics is pants, quantum electrodynamics is garbage, the Standard Model is a Frankenstein’s monster patchwork quilt theory made up of crap ideas stitched together, and it’s all kept aloft by scientific fraud concreted into place by Nobel prizes. Meanwhile modern general relativity flatly contradicts Einstein, and cosmology is based on the stupid idea of a cannonball universe and the even stupider idea of inflation.
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I’ve covered the photon to some degree in What is a photon? and The photon. As to whether I’ve covered it enough I’m not sure. But I think it’s a literal wave in space where the amplitude of the wave is always the same. Space waves. As to why the amplitude is always the same I’m not sure. It’s as if space has an elastic limit. The only paper/article I’ve seen which attempts to describe it is The quantization of electromagnetic change written in 1994 by Robert Kemp. That’s change, not charge. AFAIK the electron has a wavelength that is 2π times this amplitude, and only that wavelength will do to make what is in essence a “trivial knot”. I’m not sure about the proton. I tried writing a paper years ago with Andrew Worsley but couldn’t nail it to our mutual satisfaction. He said 4π/√c³ was related to 2.42 x 10ˉ¹² m and said the proton-electron mass ratio was related to √c/3π. I should get back on to that I suppose. And the fine structure constant. I haven’t revisited it, perhaps I should. However I’m not sure it’s related to the nature of space. Where did I get 11.7 from? From the icosahedron. But it wasn’t something precise. Maybe I should look at that properly, with some mathematical precision. So much to do, Raf!